Escher-Pades: The Bridge Demo

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Last time I wrote about The Bridge, all I’d seen of it was the exquisite little trailer that I felt an immediate compulsion to share. Although I promised to keep my eyes peeled (and I haven’t closed them since), I feared that the actual game might be years away from release, since so little information was available. Thankfully, all of my fears were dispelled when a demo appeared to coincide, more or less, with the game’s appearance at IndieCade. Download it here or read some more brief impressions below.

The trailer reminded me of And Yet It Moves because rotation was involved and my brain sometimes enjoys creating simple connections rather than actually making an effort. Hands-on investigation reveals an experience firmly at the puzzle end of the spectrum, with hardly any platforming at all. You will indeed be in control of a little man and there is even a jump button, but a lot of time is spent maneuvering other objects around the increasingly maze-like levels.

The full version of the game introduces new types of obstacle and interaction on a regular basis and I suspect I’ll be writing more about it once I’m done because so far it’s been a very pleasant surprise. It is extremely slow-paced but my eyes are so pleased by the atmosphere and design of the locations that I expect they’d have something to say if I rushed through without letting them soak in the details. Talking eyes are even more distressing than peeled ones, so I’ll gladly accept the sluggish rate at which the screen rotates and the little mad-haired man shuffles along.

As with Braid, which this resembles structurally if not mechanically, there is a story being told in cryptic fashion and I’m finding myself searching for visual clues to unravel the narrative, which is a very good sign indeed. Beyond the pleasing aesthetics, there is something beautifully suggestive about the visual design.

No release date yet but hopefully soon. Meanwhile, do take a look at the demo.

22 Comments

I was certain there was a mistake… and perhaps there is since I’m at work, on a Mac, and can’t attempt to install the demo right now, but after downloading a 25GB game the other day (Rage) I’m staring at this 463KB file and going “whut?”

What? Where did you see that? I’m now running the demo on Win XP and haven’t seen anything stating that the full version will be different.
And I can think of at least another game that went the Vista/Win7 route: Just Cause 2. Fortunately few decided to take the same path.

i dont know – the one thing the title made me think of is how often foreign names and words are mangled by english pronounciation and spelling, and how enerving it is for someone speaking that language. i always associated that a bit more with americans, though, so (even falsely) seeing a case on RPS made it sting even more – that probably accounts for the tone of my response.

i guess that pun just didnt work for me. i dont even find it funny now :< sorry.
there will be other ones that will.

The gap between appearance and sound amuses me because language is so full of confusions. Opinions will vary, of course, but I solemnly swear never to base a pun on ignorance. That would be deeply unpleasant.

Why does almost every indie game with an interesting art aesthetic have to be a platformer? Is there really no other interesting way to interact with beautiful bits of graphical assets than to jump over them? :(

I’m not being jaded and cynical, I’m just really crap at platformers, so as much as I enjoy the look of games like this I never last very long. Can’t they make turn-based RPGs or point-and-click adventures that look like this, for people with bad reflexes like me?